Most people, I believe, do
not comprehend the way in which each of us is inevitably caught up in what theologian
Ched Myers has called the “war of myths” – a battle of overarching stories that
claim to explain life (what it’s about, where it’s going, and what its purpose
is). For Myers, our lives are war-zones. Very different “big stories” about the world
vie for influence over our hearts and minds.
But most people simply take the world as they find it and get on with
their lives without reflecting too much about this battle. They simply assume that what is true about
reality and about right and wrong is obvious. However, the fact of the matter is that every
one of us lives in a world profoundly shaped by other people’s ideas. Everyone lives inside an (inevitably
disputable) story, recounted to them in the first instance by other people.
Human beings are always “storied” in this way—regardless of whether they
reflect upon this fact—just as they are always “political,” regardless of
whether they vote. The only question that
faces us is this: are we going to make any effort to ensure that we inhabit a
true and a good story, rather than a false and possibly dangerous one?

In my just-published book, Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green
Religion, and the World That Never Was (Waco: Baylor University
Press), I extend an invitation to engage in the serious critical appraisal of two
influential myths of our time. Both myths are stories about the past told in pursuit of present and
future agendas. The first I have labeled
the myth of the axial age. The idea
of an axial age was first introduced to the world by the German existentialist
philosopher Karl Jaspers in the period just after the Second World War. Modern
human beings stand, he proposed, on the far side of this crucial turning point
in history (800–200 BC), which produced the basic categories within which we
modern human beings still carry on our thinking. The cultures that experienced this new
beginning constantly return to it in order to renew themselves. As they do so,
they recognize what they hold in common, beyond all particular differences of
faith. It is to this common past that we ourselves must now return, as we strive to make the unity of humankind concrete in
the present. We must return to this axial age—the wellspring from which all
faith once emerged, behind and beneath all specific religious and philosophical
worldviews and their secularized, political forms. And, having gone back, we
must move forward to build a new world order. We must birth a new axial age—an
age of world peace. This myth has in
turn been popularized by many others, including the religious studies expert
John Hick and the popular religious historian Karen Armstrong. Even those who have never heard the
terminology may be familiar with the myth itself as expressed in the kind of
statements that often appear in Karen Armstrong’s books (e.g., the ways in
which all religions “are at the core really just the same, focusing on
compassion”).

The second myth, I have
labeled the myth of the dark green golden
age. The mythmakers in this case also believe in something like an axial
age, but they do not look back to it for inspiration, because they regard it as
an age, not of enlightenment, but of repression. Axial age civilizations destroyed
prior societies based around natural and cosmological cycles. They broke the
human connection with the earth. They also broke down human community, as individual religious
identity developed. Axial age (world)
religions, since they were not connected with particular places, inevitably
reduced the importance of place, unless that “place” was in a spiritual
afterlife. Much of what is wrong with contemporary human life results from this
embrace of civilization. To recover ourselves, we must now get back behind the
axial age, in order to recover a more authentic way of being. We must revisit
the Paleolithic era, and reconnect with our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the
state of nature. That is where we will actually
find the spirituality of empathy and compassion that we need, to save both
ourselves and the planet. How can we
access this Old Stone Age, which is long gone, and of which there is so little
meaningful trace even in the archaeological record? We can access it by way of surviving preaxial
tribal peoples not yet entirely assimilated into axial reality – indigenous
peoples of the modern period, who still tell truer stories about the world than
we modern people do. It is by listening to their wisdom that we can save
ourselves and the planet; for even into modern times, they have lived more world-affirming,
equitable and peaceable lives than axial peoples, informed by a much more
authentic, organic spirituality than is available in the world-denigrating world
religions. In particular, even into
modern times, these ancient peoples, living in harmony with nature, have
displayed the ecological knowledge without which we cannot now manage. So we must listen carefully to them, reconnect
with our deepest past by doing so, and in this way equip ourselves to move
ahead into a sustainable future. Among
the many accessible books that promote this myth are those written by ecologist
David Suzuki and anarcho-primitivists John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen.

Both these stories have been
told and retold in recent times by well-motivated people who want to make the
world a better place. Both have proved to be remarkably influential, whether at
sophisticated levels of politics and government, or at the more popular level.
The popular appetite for the myths is well-illustrated in the difficulty I
faced, when writing my book, in even getting access to the writings of people
like Karen Armstrong and Derrick Jensen for any extended period of time,
because of the demand for them in our local (including university) libraries.
Certainly here in the Pacific Northwest, many people are drawn to these myths,
and in recognition of the demand their proponents’ books are well-represented
in our bookstores.

For my own part, I have
enormous sympathy for the agendas of the writers in both camps. Nonetheless, I
believe each of the stories is patently false – and that is what I try to argue
in my book. But I also explore why it is
that the two stories are so widely believed by so many, even though they are evidently untrue, and, most
importantly, I ask whether this matters. I think it does; I think false stories are
dangerous. The flourishing of our planet, and indeed of its human inhabitants,
will not in the end be advanced by such.